Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

A NEW Blog in Town-kdphd

(***SORELLE*** requested and approved this message, though
I wrote it.)

There is a new theory blogger on the scene and
as you read that sentence you may be wondering
`oh, who is he?'
That would be the wrong question.

Check out
kdphd.blogspot.com
a new blog by a ***SORELLE*** a female theorist.
Her first blog is a short intro to herself.
The second one is
about a women-in-computing workshop she went to.

What will ***SORELLE*** blog about in the future?
She says it will be women's issues
(a term she doesn't like- perhaps she'll blog about
what to replace it with),
computer science, grad school,
politics, the politics of computer
science grad school, and whatever else comes up.
She is multi-dimensional and so I assume her
blog will be too.

She is a Comp Geometry student from
The University of Maryland. I am happy to say
I have had no influence on her whatsoever.
She is her own women.

Why is her name ***SORELLE*** ?
Because I was once asking people
what their stage names would be if they had one.
Sorelle is one of those people like MADONNA and CHER
and others celebs that have
one word names.
Hence she will always be
***SORELLE*** to me. Actually, I don't know her last name.

A pointer to her blog can now be found on our blog under
`Sorelle'. (Lance is not big on asterisks and capital letters.)

huh. I actually didn't find it patronizing... probably partially because I know Bill and partially because there *aren't* many other female theory bloggers and he was trying to make that point (one I agree with).

Of course, there's also the possibility that this was just so much more benign than the other stuff that women in theory deal with that I just didn't notice it. In which case, thanks for being on the lookout and speaking up.... even though I wasn't offended.

This isn't the first time that Bill has been accused of chauvinism because of something he's written here, but seriously, if you've been reading this blog for a while you know that ***GASARCH*** just has a certain style of writing that can be a little, um, irritating at times. Perhaps that quality gets interpreted as chauvinism if the post mentions gender issues?

Is it legitimate to point out the fact that Sorelle is female when announcing her blog? Well, I can think of female theorists in CS, and I can think of female bloggers in CS, but offhand I can't think of anyone else in the intersection of those two groups. So to me at least, that would seem to be something worth mentioning.

It's legit to mention that she's female, not so much because she happens to belong to the intersection of two sets but because it has a lot to do with the content of her blog. I just think there are better ways to do it than comparing her to starlets known more for their scanty clothes than their talent. I think Suresh's post is perfectly appropriate, for instance.

And Sorelle: if my comments created too much drama for the introduction of your blog, I apologize for that.

Boring post about an equally boring blog. A CC blog by a renowned theoretician should be mostly about the topic. Recently, it has been mostly about a lot of things OTHER than theory. Of course, you can blog about whatever you want, but this is my opinion.